THE ABANDON - Mark Reviews Movies

The Abandon, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 18, 2024

It's probably a good thing that the mechanics of what's happening in The Abandon are, to put it lightly, a bit dense. Explaining them would take too much time. Beyond that, an explanation would ruin the fun sense of discovery in Dwain Worrell's screenplay, which finds some clever ways to expand the thinking behind and the scope of this single-location thriller/mystery that makes it feel more consequential than the premise might suggest.

The basic setup is that a man becomes trapped inside a room. How he gets there is somewhat certain, having to do with a bright light in the sky that transfers him from a war zone in the Middle East to the room. Why he's there is the big puzzle, while the biggest question is whether or not he'll be able to escape.

That man is Miles (Jonathan Rosenthal), a soldier with the U.S. Army currently deployed in Iraq, who watches as his comrades are shot and killed in an opening sequence that wastes no time. Miles is shot, too, just below the ribs, and in the chaos and confusion of battle, he lies down on the ground, almost certain this is the end for him.

That's when the light appears above him in the sky, and in a flash of white, he awakens to find himself in an empty space. It's maybe 24 feet across and tall. The walls, floor, and ceiling are tiles of some smooth, grayish stone, and silence fills the air.

Miles cleans and bandages his wound and gets to work investigating his limited surroundings. Look, everyone is probably thinking the obvious here, and sure enough, there's some writing on the wall. It might be upside-down, but it's perfectly legible: "Abandon all hope." Even Miles knows what those words portend, and he immediately worries that he died on that battlefield and is now in some kind of afterlife—not a good one, either, given that the phrase is what Dane Alighieri imagined and popularized as being written above the gates of hell.

Worrell proves himself too smart for the obvious, though, and more intelligent enough to raise the most expected solution to this situation, only to demolish it quickly. Miles isn't dead, and this is no supernatural hereafter, where the guy will have to reckon with his life or be punished for his thoughts and deeds. The punishment is more tangible, as the room has a lot of pain and mind-bending potential in store for him, and while the circumstances of his imprisonment may be otherworldly in some way, the ways of figuring out what's happening and how he might get out of this not-literally-damned place are fairly practical.

We can follow along with the logic of the space and its purpose, even if everything about seems completely illogical at first. The room starts heating up, leading Miles to undress some and keep his exposed skin from touching the tiles, which turn out to be more-than-adequate conductors of heat. Later, the room turns cold, as ice spreads across the tiles and Miles' body develops a layer of frost. What's happening here?

Miles keeps asking that to himself and, later, someone else, who oddly has similar questions about a room just like this room. She's Damsey (Tamara Perry), who calls Miles on the satellite phone that was transported/teleported/beamed to the room with him and the rest of his gear. That's all we'll say about her for the moment, because Worrell has imagined a nifty puzzle of a script that plays with dimensions of these characters and others more generally.

The pieces come together in such a way that genuinely surprises, because the screenwriter leads us down one path with such firmness of direction that we don't even notice he's going down a completely different route. When the answers come, we realize that we might not even have been asking the right questions.

That's also about all that should be said of any kind of plotting, which becomes about ideas—both specific to the functioning of the room and generally about humanity—and how Miles works with Damsey to solve the various enigmas of the room. The sterile look of the space may seem limiting, but it's impressive how director Jason Satterlund uses the camera to make it visually compelling. When Miles first arrives inside it, the camera spins around him to take in the full but restricted sense of his entrapment, and one wonders what kind of technical trickery might be at play here for the room to show no sign of entrance or exit and no apparent source of light to view it in such detail.

Some of that is part of the game of the screenplay, of course, and there's more. The ambient sound inside or just outside the room, which hints at some mechanical systems at work but blocked from sight, occasionally becomes deafening. Again, the room has surprises in store, and they'll remain such here. It's worth hinting at that Miles sees more action than skulking around the space, talking to Damsey, and reading various clues, as the room possesses more functions than extreme climate control. It's also worth nothing that the sense of claustrophobia mounts, and that's not just from Satterlund's use of close-ups to take in Rosenthal's increasingly desperate and dejected performance.

The Abandon is a skillful little mystery from a writing angle and a technical one. It's also a nice reminder, in case one is needed, that limitations of location and budget don't have to equate to limitations of imagination and execution.

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